Blog Archives

I’ve been playing Xenoblade Chronicles X a lot lately and I think it’s a great game, though not without its flaws. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today. Today, it’s about censorship. There’s really no point to anything I have to say. It’s just some stuff that crossed my mind, so if you’re busy, or looking for a more socially relevant story, feel free to go read something else. But if you came on the internet today, like so many others, to waste time, then please, read on.

Now when a game gets localized here from Japan, I expect there to be a good deal of changes and aspects censored because of this country’s outdated puritanical beliefs that the human body is shameful and that seeing any parts of it exposed is a corrupting force.

Typical mother of an 11 year-old boy – “Oh no way! This game has nudity in it. You can’t play that. What about this one though? This just has offensive language and mindless violence. That is far less offensive than the body nature gave us”

Anyway…the 2 main things that I discovered they censored are what drove me to write this.

1) During character creation of a female avatar, in the Japanese release, aside from changing their height, you can also adjust their bust size. Why remove this? Why have it in there in the first place for that matter? Well that one I can answer rather easily – It’s either fan service or if you’re creating an avatar for a game where you have a ton of customization options, why not have a wider range of options you can customize? But in this case, since there are really not too many options for character customization I would say it’s purely for fan service. Still though, why remove it? Probably because someone out there would complain that it “gives girls an unrealistic image of what the female form is supposed to look like,” or some other BS like that. Whatever. Get over it. It’s a video game. It’s a fantasy world where people can escape to. If some lonely, “hopeless romantic” gets his or her (let’s not discriminate now, women love tits too) jollies by running around an alien planet as a big busted bombshell, then let them have their fantasy.

Japan – that 2nd bar is for the bust size

America

2) The female characters in the game all have “armor” sets that are basically strips of fabric passing for underwear. One of the main characters in the game, Lin, is a 13 year-old, young girl. In the Japanese version, she, just like the other female characters, has this revealing armor. Her avatar was censored so that when equipping these particular pieces of armor, it would have a more modest appearance. As much as I think that censoring things is stupid, I also think that sexualizing 13 year olds is awful. I don’t see the point in censoring something in a video game, but then again I also don’t see the point of programming young girls to have sexy clothing unless you’re a sick pervert….but #japan

Decided that I wanted to make some GBA repros as well. There’s a few GBA games that never came out here that I’d like to have a cart for; not too many, but enough to make me interested in the endeavor. What better one to start with than Mother 3.

That being said, they’re kind of a pain in the butt to make and I don’t think I’d ever really do this in any sizable quantities, unless of course someone has a stock of blank GBA PCBs out there.

So obviously Mother 3 is one of the hot ones, but what’s next? Anyone have any suggestions? Anything they know of they’d like to see in cart format? There’s a Suikoden card game I was thinking of doing…

Made this cart awhile ago but just finished a playthrough. Did not complete it. Got killed pretty horribly. This is pretty much the first survival horror game, or at least the first one that introduced many common elements of the survival horror genre. Resident Evil owes its existence to Sweet Home as it borrows many of the concepts that were originally introduced in 1989.

A noteworthy accomplishment, which is nearly unheard of even to this day, was it’s success as game as it co-launched next to its movie counterpart.

If you are interested in purchasing this cart, send me a message. You can click on the image for more details and check out the gameplay video.

But not in the US. See that release date? 2012! Could have been localized by now!

Since I’m a huge fan of Dragon Quest, possibly my favorite RPG series ever, I was having a hard time waiting for Nintendo to localize Dragon Quest X here. I see dates on a few websites referencing a 2014 release date for Dragon Quest X on the Wii U, but I don’t believe it. It wasn’t even mentioned in passing at E3. I think I’ve finally come to terms that they will NEVER bring Dragon Quest X to America. I don’t understand why not. Were the sales on the DS titles really that poor? You would think a game that’s primarily online would do well here considering, on average, Americans do more online gaming than Japan especially since playing video games as an adult in Japan isn’t as socially acceptable as it is here.

I hadn’t bothered to mod my Wii yet, even though it’s relatively easy. I just never really saw the need. I don’t particularly agree with pirating games and there were no import games I thought were interesting enough to make the purchase. So I grew tired of waiting for Dragon Quest X and conceded to grabbing an import and mod my Wii. Then it became abundantly clear to me this wouldn’t be a simple matter. The 2-disc Dragon Quest X doesn’t run off the discs, they are simply for installation. But as you are all aware, the Wii has a “fun sized” hard drive. So aside from just modding the Wii to play import games, you have to install the game onto a USB flash drive. Minor inconvenience, whatever, pressing on. Now I come across the really bad news. The game isn’t just region locked, it’s ISP locked. In order to play this game, you need to be on an Japanese server provider. Yeah well, I dunno how to do that and I haven’t been able to find information on how to do that and even if I did, I think the hassle would be too extreme. You know what I think would be easier? LOCALIZING THIS FRIGGIN GAME IN AMERICA!

Now for some good news. Apparently that might happen? Square Enix is toying with the idea of expanding the game outside of Japan. Doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll get it, or even get a full version of it if we do. It’s possible we may only get an offline only version, WHICH WOULD BE TOTALLY OK! I Just NEED this game. What do you want me to do? I will suck your dick for this game! Two girls one cup? Is that what you want me to do? I’ll do it…I won’t like it, but if it gets me this game, I’ll do that….

Who wants to start a petition? Not the sucking thing. I don’t think anyone wants to see a petition for that. I mean a petition to localize this game. It worked for Xenoblade after all, right? Anyone know how to get one of those rolling?